


Creator

by winchysteria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Scientists, Dean-Centric, Destiel Ficlet Challenge, Human Castiel, I'm Sorry, M/M, also because i didn't give myself enough time to write, also the plot and pacing are shamefully bad, plus also this 'verse wanted to be a way longer fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 10:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2064558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchysteria/pseuds/winchysteria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is not Dr. Frank N. Furter. Not even with a patient as cute as this asshole.</p>
<p>(aka "Don't Look Directly At My Plot Or It Will Fall Apart" with scientist!dean, clone!cas, and my chronic inability to not produce fluff. unbeta'd and badly written :))</p>
            </blockquote>





	Creator

**First Appointment**

“I’m going to need you to lay back for just a second, Anna,” Dean said, patting the exam table.

She complied, paper crinkling as she settled herself. “Is it weird? Examining us?”

He thought for a second, rolling thumbs over the bones in her hands. “It was hard to get used to, at first.” And it was. He thought it's because he expected them to be creepier, you know, pictured dead eyes and clammy skin. But that's irrational; they're humans, through and through, from a cellular level up. Their eyebrows twitch and their voices all have distinctive cadences. They're not Chucky or C-3PO or even Spock. The first exam he ever gave, the ANG had shaken his hand and made eye contact, and that alone almost knocked Dean flat on his ass.

“I’m going to put gentle pressure on your stomach now,” he said, prodding at Anna’s torso once she gave him a nod.

But Anna was talkative, and he wasn’t off the hook yet. “What was hard to get used to?”

He wanted to tell her the same thing he’d told Sam, that night of his first exam. How it had been eerie and not at all in the way he expected. How the guy had commented on traffic and deliberated over which arm he wanted the blood-pressure cuff on. (Sam had shrugged and scraped the bottom of the baby food jar before replying. "They're people, Dean," he said. "They're not another species. I mean, if you really think about it, he's an adult with adult capacities, but with, say, Bella's level of life experience."

As if on cue, Bella coughed a glob of peas onto Sam's wrist. "See, that's what I'm talking about," Dean said, grimacing. "The guy's only existed for a couple of weeks, and he's driving himself to doctor's appointments. Everyone else who's two weeks old poops and sleeps all day.")

Instead, Dean shrugged. “I think, partially, I was expecting you to be different than the way you were. And partially- I’m moving on to the joints in your legs now, if that’s okay?”

What he’d said to Sam wasn’t exactly what he meant, but it was close enough. It wasn't that he couldn't wrap his brain around it. God knows he understood the science behind the ANG project; the Shurley Ethical Cloning Trust had scouted him at MIT a semester into his doctorate when Singer called them about the student who designed subdermal back braces off of gene markers and X-rays. He knew that the people he examined were functional human adults print-cloned from augmented donor DNA; he had seen their genetic code mapped out for him on computer screens before their conception. “Partially,” he continued, moving Anna’s calf around, testing the flexibility in her knee, “it’s a little bit surreal to look at your tibia right now and think that I’ve seen it on a 3D modeler.”

He’d corrected its curvature, actually, just a few months before. That was the time when the front desk telling him that an exam was here would make his stomach contract uncomfortably.

Anna nodded. “Interesting.”

“But,” he shot her a smile as she sat up on the edge of the table. “I’m used to it now.”

He was more than used to it now- getting fond, honestly. His patients’ personalities rose to the surface a little more every time he saw them- Anna, for instance, was almost silent during her first two appointments, but had begun peppering him with questions a month or so ago. Now, when she gave him kind eyes and asked about his friends and Sam, he felt sort of proud and mushy. As much as he loved lab work, the human interaction made him much happier. Charlie in tech called his doofy post-appointment smile ‘the maternal glow.’

He was sure he was wearing it as he ushered Anna out of the exam room and plucked his buzzing cell phone from his coat pocket.

"Dr. Winchester, you’ve got an angel here for his 2:15," the receptionist chirped on the end of the line.

"Send him to 320 and tell him I'll be right there. Thanks, Becky," he replied, hanging up decisively.

He pulled up his schedule as he took the elevator down to the third floor. 2:15 was Castiel, a new patient, if he remembered correctly. The name rang a bell, vaguely, but he couldn’t remember anything specific. The profile that the name linked to wasn’t much help either, a PDF of an empty patient chart that had little more than a confirmation of initial health, a serial number, and a donor name- James Novak. There was probably supposed to be a picture where the gray avatar head was, but it wasn’t loading. “We literally build people in this building,” Dean grumbled, trying to refresh the profile again. “Why is the WiFi such a pile of shit?”

“The two seem unconnected,” someone rumbled to his right.

Dean startled and immediately ran forehead-first into an exam room door.

“What the hell, man?” he said, rubbing his forehead and squinting into the exam room itself for the source of the voice. It had sounded like a guy, at least, but Dean was tearing up somewhat and had to blink furiously for ten seconds or so before he could get a good fix on this person.

And- okay.

He was a little shorter than Dean, with dark, rumpled hair and a head tilt that solidly straddled the line between confused and critical. A day or two of stubble disrupted the lines of his jaw, and standing under his gaze felt like getting a full-body X-ray. He was- intriguing. That was a relatively safe word.

“Doctor Winchester?” he asked, just as Dean was about to ask if he needed help finding something.

Dean tried to be very casual about craning around to the hallway side of the door. Room 320. Of course.

“Castiel?” he said, putting  his doctor composure back on and striding forward to offer this guy a hand to shake. Which he did, shifting the laser eyes to his hand making contact with Dean’s, then up to Dean’s face.

“Yes.”

He’d never met someone who took their name so seriously.

He settled the guy on the exam table, taken a seat on a chair facing him with his tablet. They ran through an initial questionnaire, what the team usually called the You-OK, and Castiel’s brick-wall composure didn’t loosen up even the tiniest bit. “Okay, so we’ll begin the physical in just a minute, but do you have any questions for me at this point?” Dean asked, folding his hands on the keyboard and locking eyes with the other man- who appeared never to have looked away at all.

He tilted his head to the right just a little more. “Well, initially- based on your performance with the door- I was going to ask if you were really up to par for your position. But you do seem competent, so i’ll ignore that.”

Dean huffed a laugh out his nose. “Okay. Anything else?”

“The woman at the front desk called me an angel. I was under the impression that that was an expression used for infants or people who perform acts of kindness. Why was it applied to me?”

He laughed a little, at the deadly serious expression on Castiel’s face if nothing else. “Oh, that’s just a nickname some of the staff have for our patients. The official acronym we use to describe you is ANG- Autofitted Natural Genetics-”

“I know.”

“-and angels is just a little bit easier to say. Would you rather they call you something else?”

He shifted his eyes to the cupboards just above Dean’s head, looked thoughtful for a brief moment, and then shrugged. “I have no objection to the term.”

“Okay.” Dean, feeling a little less hesitant, smiled at him.

His brow furrowed even further.

The physical exam proceeded almost silently for the first few minutes. The ANG looked at himself, at wherever Dean’s hands were prodding or rolling or working. Fascination with their own system wasn’t uncommon- happened more often than not- but with Castiel, it was like something brand new. He was so sharp, so focused and fascinated that Dean, who had a Master’s of Science in human anatomy, felt oddly as if he was seeing a person’s body for the first time.

But finally, the silence was drawn out too long. Dean cleared his throat. “So, uh, Cas- what line of work are you in?”

“Cas?”

Dean felt the tips of his ears get warm. “Sorry. Should I go back to Castiel?”

“No, Cas is- all right. I’m in linguistics.”

This was just a little funny, considering how he used words practically, mundanely, like bricks in a wall. “What drew you to that field?”

Cas jumped infinitesimally at the feeling of a cold metal instrument just inside his ear canal. “I was told my donor was talented in languages, and I thought I would probably share the same tendency.”

That rang a bell, for sure. James Novak. Now he remembered. Guy had known- what, eight languages? Nine? Dean had met him a couple of times, offered some advice to Print on his shoulder and hip implants. Later, he’d gone into his genetic code and reduced the risk of early-onset arthritis in- well, in Cas. That was a itchy thought, and it came at almost precisely the same time as the realization that the shoulder he had just clapped companionably was nice and solid and felt kind of muscular. Dean shook his head to fend off the incoming train of thought.

“And how are you finding linguistics?” he asked, trying much harder than he normally did not to act weird.

“I enjoy it. Of course, I had to perfect my English first, but things should get more interesting once I branch out into a few other languages as well.”

“Well, you’re ahead of me- I can barely speak English if it’s not medical jargon.”

Cas almost laughed at that, then let him slide the blood pressure cuff over his right wrist. Dean tried not to be interested in the way his arm felt.

**Second Appointment**

“That,” Charlie said as she swivelled in her office chair, “is not the maternal glow.”

“Good,” Dean said. “Maybe I’m done going soft.”

The redhead raised her eyebrows and replied to something on her phone at lightning speed. “No, Dean. You will never stop being a teddy bear. That face is just something different.”

He rolled his eyes, but sank down into the chair next to her anyway.

“So,” Charlie said, turning to face her computer screen. “How are the kiddos?”

“They’re adults.”

“You know what I mean.”

Dean resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out at her. “They’re good, I think. One of them is very much enjoying the casino scene. Another is done with the teachers’ program and found her first job. One of them- he’s learning Spanish and adopting a guinea pig, so he’s naming it Don Quixote.”

“Don Quixote?” She was scanning down endless columns of html now, presumably looking for the bug in the arterial cartographer that had been displaying the wrong vein width down in fingers and toes.

“Yep. Told me with this dead straight face too, but then again he says everything that way.”

Charlie smiled at him, chin perched on her shoulder. “That’s actually adorable. And I don’t mean that as in he’s a child, but- you know.”

Dean felt the corners of his mouth turn up of their own volition. “Yeah, I get it.”

“That’s still not the maternal glow.”

**Sixth Appointment**

"Hello, Dean."

“Heya, Cas,” Dean said, slipping through the exam room door. “How have you been?”

Cas shrugged. He did that now. It was surprisingly humanizing. “I’ve been fairly well, overall. The jogging, especially, has been- calming.”

“You stuck with that, huh.” Dean pulled Castiel’s outpatient chart up on his tablet.

Cas nodded, stripped off his coat. There were some ANGs that developed a refined sense of style, and he was not one of them- the oversized tan trenchcoat appeared maybe the second or third time Dean saw Castiel and had made consistent repeat performances since. It made him look narrower, smaller; those broad shoulders seemed like a magic trick coming out from under all that khaki fabric.

“So how’s the French coming along? Lift up your right arm, please.”

Talking to Cas, as the weeks wore on, felt less and less like talking to a patient. They were friends, kind of. Becky at the front desk said they were flirty, but Becky saw flirting everywhere. It was banter. It was comfortable. And it was well within the boundaries of an acceptable doctor-patient relationship.

“Il n'est pas très difficile,” Cas said, one corner of his mouth twitching up. He looked like that when he was trying to pretend to be less proud of something than he was.

“Hey, look at you, Clouseau! Nailing those accents down like a champ.”

Castiel was still half-grinning, though he protested a little.  “I’ve seen The Pink Panther now, Doctor Winchester. I know that’s not a compliment.”

Dean laughed. “Okay, one, it’s Dean, and two, you should take it as one anyway. Clouseau’s detecting skills have room for improvement, but his French is fantastic.”

“Well, you still say hors d'oeuvres wrong, so I really shouldn’t be listening to you,” Cas said- perfectly poker-faced except for the smile lines scrunching up around his eyes.

Despite the stress of regular jogging, Cas’ knee joints were doing fine. Dean congratulated himself silently on a job well done (for now), but felt his stomach contract when he felt tendons move underneath the thin skin of the back of the angel’s knee. Dean’s tendons, sort of. He’d tweaked their lengths; played with stiffening and loosening.

Dean cleared his throat. “No, you probably shouldn’t.”

**Eleventh Appointment**

“How’s my favorite girl?” Dean gushed, swinging Bela out of her high chair. She fussed at him until he settled her on his hip.

Jess clicked around the corner on her high heels, trailed by a chubby toddler in nothing but a big t-shirt and a pull-up diaper. “Thank you so much for coming, Dean. Garth has that date and I absolutely can’t not be at this meeting and Sam’s flight doesn’t land for hours and I just-”

“Come on, Jess, I'm always happy to take care of the Brady Bunch for you. You know that. And hello there, Adam, you heartthrob!" Dean said, squatting to receive a (snotty) hug from his nephew.

"Ugh, Dean, you are a lifesaver. You know where everything is; bedtime is at 7:30, but I'll bet they'll try to stay up till their dad gets home. Eat whatever, read whatever-” she paused halfway through putting one earring in. “Don't watch violent action movies with my three-year-old. You know the drill."

“I sure do. Now if you have to go, go!” Dean stood, a kid on each hip. “We’re fine, right guys?”

Bela and Adam nodded very seriously. Jess gave them each one last peck on the cheek and was out the door in a gust of efficiency and perfume.

After a few hours of cowboying around the house with finger guns and Dean as a horse, Adam was out like a light. Bela, though, kept waking up in her crib, and finally Dean just bundled up the baby and settled her in his lap on the couch for some channel-surfing until one of her parents got back.

Two episodes of NCIS later, the only decent thing he could find was Rocky Horror Picture Show. It held a weird kind of place in his heart, and for the first few musical numbers he just floated along, half-asleep. “You know,” he mumbled to the bundle of baby in his lap, “Brad kind of reminds me of this guy at my work.”

And of course that had to come up. Good. Think of the patient you have a kiddy crush on while you’re watching Rocky Horror. What could go wrong.

He squirmed all the way through to Eddie’s murder before feeling the need to say something again. “Also, I would just like you to know that I am not in any way similar to Dr. Frank N. Furter. I am a normal genetic engineer who may have seen an attractive patient during my workday today.”

He almost dropped Bela to the floor when Sam’s voice came from the doorway. “What’s all the worry about Dr. Frank N. Furter?”

“Jesus, Sam, you snuck up on me.”

“I caught you in a moment of introspection is what that was.” Sam flopped onto the other end of the couch, looking moderately exhausted but holding a couple of beers

“Come on, I don’t- I don’t introspect,” Dean snorted, waving a hand and reaching for the remote again.

He could feel Sam staring holes into the side of his head. After a minute, he glanced over cautiously. “What?”

Sam shook his head. “If I give you this beer, will you tell me why you think you’re Doctor Frank N. Furter?”

Dean made a grabby hand at the beer. “I think I’m not, and maybe.”

Sam let him get, like, three sips in before he restarted the conversation. “What’s up, Dean?”

“It’s not anything. I just- make people for a living.” He took a longer pull from his bottle.

Sam rolled his eyes and plucked Bela out of Dean’s arms. “So, if we’re talking angels, is Rocky the whole pool or a specific individual?”

“I think you’re getting too in depth with this analogy, Doctor Freud.”

“Just tell me what’s going on.”

Dean cleared his throat. “Well. I’m a scientist, all right, and I have test subjects, and my test subjects are people. And sometimes they’re hot people. It’s not a big thing.”

Sam did not look like this was good enough.

“Okay, look, Dean. If you have feelings for one of your patients- don’t look at me like that, you wouldn’t be freaking out if you were just attracted to them- you have to remember that they’re not test subjects anymore, right? They’re adults, they can think their decisions through, and they have autonomy in their everyday lives. You just run diagnostics. For all intents and purposes, you are their regular doctor. And sure, you know a little more about their genetic code than the average primary care physician, but you didn’t sew them together out of mismatched body parts, okay? They’re just people. They’re their own people. You need to stop overthinking this.”

Dean made a face at him.

“And now,” Sam said, unfolding his gigantic self from the couch, “Bela and I are going to bed.”

Second-to-Last Appointment

“How was your week, Dean?”

The thing about letting yourself like someone, Dean decided, was that suddenly everything they did- blinking, breathing, asking about your life- made you want to lean over the exam table and kiss their stupid chapped lips.

“Pretty good. Saw some patients, babysat for my brother, watched too much television.” He shrugged. “Nothing revolutionary. Yours?”

“I spoke a lot of French and a little bit of German. And I learned how to make brownies from a box, which I did in fact find somewhat revolutionary.”

Dean laughed. Castiel looked pleased with himself.

The other thing about letting yourself like someone was that you had trouble carrying out functional thought processes while you were putting your hands all over them. Dean stood way too close to Cas when he gave him an eye test. He took his blood pressure twice. At one point, Cas asked him a question while he was poking around his kidneys, and he ended up resting his hands on the other man’s hips for a minute and a half while they talked. He fumbled out an apology for it, feeling like a total asshole, and then proceeded to look directly into Cas’ eyes for another half a minute while he waited for a reply that Cas had already given. It was a train wreck of an appointment. An abomination. Forty-five minutes later, he didn’t even know if he’d filled out the chart right, but he finally decided he had to be done. “All right, Cas, looks like you can go- or, never mind, I think you have something scheduled down in the computer lab.”

The angel nodded. “Yes, someone called me about that.”

“Um. Can you find your way down there?”

“I’m not totally sure,” Cas replied.

Well, Dean had already shot himself in the foot today, so things couldn’t get any worse on the way down to Tech. He was painfully aware of his personal space in the elevator, tried not to brush against Cas in the hallway, and then proceeded to lose his grasp on the English language and stare into the other man’s eyes for ten or fifteen seconds at the door to the computer lab when all he’d needed to say was “we’re here.” Once he’d dropped him off, Dean cringed all the way back to his office, where an email from Charlie was waiting for him.

>> Becky Rosenberg is right.

**Last Appointment**

Dean collapsed into his desk chair feeling nothing but relief. Residual embarrassment from the disaster with Cas yesterday had all but incapacitated him for today, and he was ready to ignore his paperwork and take a recovery nap. He slumped down over an empty space on his desk, pillowed his head on his arms, and then groaned internally when someone knocked on his office door. He wallowed in self-pity for a few seconds before pushing himself up to see who it was.

And, like he was still in fact napping and had begun a nightmare, it was Cas.

He smiled despite himself, waving the angel into his office. “Hey, Castiel. What can I help you with?”

Cas ignored the chair that Dean indicated for him, playing with the edges of his sleeves as he stood instead.

“I’ve come to inform you that I will be seeing Doctor Mills for my check-ups from now on. I wanted to tell you myself.” He can’t quite make eye contact with Dean, and it makes his stomach twist.

He dropped with as much control as possible into his desk chair. So he became so unprofessional that his patient requested a switch to another employee. Great. That was- god, it was humiliating, and more than a little disappointing. “Okay, then. Any, uh, any particular reason for the switch? If you don’t mind saying.”

Cas dropped his hands to his sides. “I had an- enlightening conversation with a Ms. Charlie Bradbury yesterday.”

He was going to kill Charlie.

“She informed me that there are some things that are inappropriate in a doctor-patient relationship.”

Slowly and painfully.

“Apparently, if I were to be romantically interested in my doctor, I would have to see a different physician before the relationship could proceed.”

Dean blinked, processing the sentence a few more times. “Okay.”

Cas finally looked at him directly. “So, having made the necessary adjustments, I am taking things into my own hands. I would like to have dinner with you. Hopefully more than once, but we can discuss that when we come to it.”

“I- um,” Dean tried to reassemble his brain. “That sounds great, Cas. I’d love to.”

The other man nodded. “Okay then, Dean,” he said, striding forward. “I will pick you up at seven.”

He placed a hand on Dean’s shoulder, dropped a kiss to his mouth, and strode out of the room.

Charlie named his new look “the Cas stupor.”

 


End file.
